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The American Prospect - articles by authorenThe Spirit of '56http://prospect.org/article/spirit-56
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>America turns 50 this year -- the America, that is, that we recognize as ours. It was half a century ago that our new founding fathers made their debut on the national stage: Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Elvis Presley. The latter, per <em>Life</em>'s August 27, 1956, issue, was “Elvis -- A Different Kind of Idol”: a different idol for a different America. </p>
<p>The chronicler -- or maybe even the Tom Paine -- of this new New World was the 31-year-old Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank. “I am photographing how Americans live, have fun, eat, drive cars, work, etc.,” Frank wrote to his parents. From December 1955 through the summer of 1956, Frank crossed and re-crossed the continent, driving south from New York, out to California, and back east through the Midwest, stopping in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention. It was there that a handsome young senator who was not yet well known to the wider public, John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, was put forth as a candidate for vice president; although another senator got the nod, Kennedy was tabbed as a political Elvis -- front-runner for the 1960 nomination.</p>
<p>Frank photographed Detroit autoworkers; Hoboken, New Jersey, politicians; New York City drag queens; the workday crowd on New Orleans' Canal Street; Oral Roberts on television. His subject matter encompassed rodeos, picnics, funerals; he specialized in solitary lunch counters and empty highways. Frank was the first to document the Strip -- the ubiquitous yet ignored, nowhere but everywhere, a democratic realm at once concrete and allegorical of billboards, drive-ins, and gas stations. A vanguard beatnik, he completed his road trip ahead of the 40,000-mile interstate highway system authorized by Congress, as well as <em>Time</em>'s assertion that such highways were “really <em>the</em> American art ... a true index of our culture.”</p>
<p></p><center> * * * </center>
<p>By comparison to previous photo-travelogues, Frank's paid striking attention to black, as well as white, America -- separate and unequal. His signature photograph “Trolley-New Orleans” pondered a succession of Americans on their journey through life, faces framed through the vehicle's windows, and blacks confined to the rear seats. It was while Frank was on the road that, less two years after the Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional, the Montgomery bus boycott led by Martin Luther King Jr. initiated the resistance against American apartheid. </p>
<p><em>Time</em> first reported the boycott in mid-January; there were segregationist riots in nearby Tuscaloosa, where Autherine Lucy -- the first black student to attend the University of Alabama -- was banned from campus for what the university's board termed her own safety -- and King's home was bombed in January. By the end of the month, he was booked, along with almost 100 other civil-rights leaders, for violating the state's anti-boycott law. By now, Montgomery had become an ongoing national news story and King's indictment would make front-page headlines. Even network television was covering the boycott and the arrests. </p>
<p>The whole world, as would later be said, was watching, and the context was global: An ABC commentator compared the Alabama protests to those led by Gandhi against the British in India. King himself made the point more forcefully, implicitly linking the civil-rights movement to the previous year's Bandung conference of Third World nations, when he told a mass meeting that, part of “a great moment in history,” the Montgomery boycott was “bigger than Montgomery” and that the protesters were part of global movement: “The vast majority of the people of the world are colored, [and] up until four or five years ago [most] were exploited by the empires of the west.”</p>
<p>The so-called Third World continued to find its voice. In mid-July, Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt would issue a joint communiqué calling for the end of French rule in Algeria, as well as the suspension of all nuclear tests and the institution of United Nations–directed disarmament. A few days later, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal -- setting the stage for a post-colonial war that fall when Britain and France launched an attack to regain the canal, with Israel's help.</p>
<p></p><center> * * * </center>
<p>Meanwhile, behind the Iron Curtain, shockwaves were spreading from Moscow: The 20th Communist Party Congress opened in mid-February with Nikita Khrushchev's criticism of the Stalinist personality cult. This attack would be greatly elaborated 11 days later in Khrushchev's so-called secret speech enumerating Stalin's crimes. Even before the <em>Daily Worker</em> opened the floodgates as the lone Communist daily to publish the complete secret speech, the newspaper editorialized against Soviet anti-Semitism and, for the first time in memory, let a thousand flowers bloom. Beginning with a column by its managing editor, the newspaper frankly acknowledged the tumult convulsing world communism, giving space to both Stalin's attackers and defenders (as well as those seeking a middle position). </p>
<p>The Old Left was dead; the New Left, not yet born. It was a moment for manifestos. In early March, Allen Ginsberg began running off mimeographed copies of “Howl,” the barbaric yawp with which he had presented several months earlier to the beatnik audience at a San Francisco poetry reading. Around the same time Ginsberg's countercultural samizdat appeared, “Blue Suede Shoes” became the first record to reach the top of the pop, R&amp;B, and country music charts. As self-assertive in its way as “Howl,” albeit declaring the singer's sartorial independence, Carl Perkins' rockabilly hit was a new national anthem. Years later, rock journalist Stanley Booth would call it “one of the most important steps in the evolution of American consciousness since the Emancipation Proclamation. </p>
<p>The success of “Blue Suede Shoes” among blacks represented an actually grass-roots acknowledgment of a common heritage, a mutual overcoming of poverty and lack of style, an act of forgiveness, of redemption.</p>
<p>From an artistic point of view, the energies liberated by the Supreme Court's decision in <em>Brown</em> received their fullest expression that May with the release of John Ford's great and troubling evocation of American race hatred and reconciliation, <em>The Searchers</em>. In its return to the genre's root issues, <em>The Searchers</em> was the most radical western ever made -- grappling with the idea that Americans were no longer white Europeans but something else. </p>
<p>Indeed, it was while <em>The Searchers</em> was in production that Memphis record producer Sam Phillips expressed his desire for a new America in commercial terms: The time was ripe for “a white boy who could sing like a Negro” and, as if answering Phillips' prayer, an 18-year-old Mississippi-born guitar-playing truck driver materialized in his studio -- the first and greatest of White Negroes, to appropriate the title of Norman Mailer's celebrated essay, published in <em>Dissent</em> in the summer of 1957.</p>
<p>Elvis Presley enjoyed the most meteoric rise in the history of American show biz. If 1955 had been the year of the juvenile delinquent -- Congress held hearings and magazines waxed solemn as <em>The Blackboard Jungle</em> and <em>Rebel Without a Cause</em> introduced a new mythology of violence based on the hot-rod and the switchblade -- something was still missing: a focal point for the mass audience of crazy mixed-up kids. </p>
<p></p><center> * * * </center>
<p>Communism was over! Throughout the summer of '56, Elvis was attacked by newspapers, preachers, teachers, cops, politicians, the entire state ideological apparatus. There were demands he be banned, curbed, run out of town. The August 27 issue of <em>Life</em> showed pictures of fundamentalist congregations praying for his soul, and of Elvis fans prostrating themselves on his front lawn. Of course, Elvis the Pelvis had no need to minister to teen spiritual angst; at the very moment of his apotheosis, a less corporeal idol hovered over the land, subject of a parallel and equally hysterical craze. In late summer, <em>Time</em> reported “a weird new phenomenon is loose in the land; a teenage craze for a boyish Hollywood actor named James Dean, who has been dead for 11 months.”</p>
<p>The tumult reached its climax in November. <em>Time</em> reported that TV had “joined the weird posthumous cult of James Dean” by re-broadcasting three undistinguished tele-dramas in which Dean played minor parts. “He's hotter than anybody alive,” one unnamed executive declared. Well, almost anyone. President Eisenhower was overwhelmingly reelected, and the opening of <em>Love Me Tender</em>, the routine western into which Elvis had been hastily inserted, was a media event comparable to <em>The Jazz Singer</em> -- returning its production costs in two weeks. </p>
<p>November 1956 was also the end of the glorious Hungarian Revolution and the end of the hopes inspired by the 20th Party Congress. The Voice of America may have encouraged the Hungarian uprising, but America itself paid only lip service to the rebellion. Eisenhower used his political capital to halt the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Suez rather than Soviet invasion of Budapest. Still, <em>Time</em>'s man of the year would be a long-haired youth with a gun, perfect sublimation for the juvenile delinquency that succeeded communism as America's great internal threat. Suddenly the ideological apparatus turned cheerleader, re-imagining the crazy mixed-up kid as Freedom Fighter. </p>
<p>As the year ended, the Supreme Court rejected Montgomery's last appeal and the bus boycott ended, triumphant. Black militancy had asserted itself, a counter-culture announced its presence, America's vernacular landscape was recognized and a new youthful demographic ran wild. In Europe, reform communism was crushed by Russian tanks. There's a sense in which 1968 was the 12th anniversary of the forces unleashed in ‘56.</p>
<p><em>J. Hoberman is a senior film critic for</em> The Village Voice<em> and the author of </em>The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties.</p>
</div></div></div>Sun, 17 Sep 2006 19:42:21 +0000145722 at http://prospect.orgJ. HobermanSee It Againhttp://prospect.org/article/see-it-again
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>The irresistible force of America's post–World War II Red Scare first slammed into the immovable object of network television in September 1953, when the House Un-American Activities Committee revealed that TV's biggest star had registered to vote in the 1936 election as a Communist. The redhead was a Red.</p>
<p>For the next week, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz -- or, rather, Lucy and Desi, as neither broke character throughout the crisis -- spun like dervishes, giving interviews and working their fans. Careers had been smashed for far less, but ultimately Lucy's flaming past only made sense as one more domestic mishap -- she had, she explained, just been trying to please another character, her wacky “socialist” grandpa. The sponsor held fast, and so did CBS. Thus did TV assert itself as the narrative engine of American public life. Next, the emboldened medium would expose and topple the most fearsome Communist-hunter of all, America's grand inquisitor and witch-finder general, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin.</p>
<p>The particulars of that exposure are the subject of George Clooney's <i>Good Night, and Good Luck</i>. A classy docudrama shot in crisp black and white, Clooney's movie takes its title from CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow's trademark sign-off, and, with admirable restraint, restages the multi-round 1953–54 televised prizefight in which the urbane journalist vanquished the roughneck demagogue -- or, rather, set him up for the televised act of self-destruction that was the Army-McCarthy hearings. </p>
<p>Having achieved media stardom in the early 1950 aftermath of Alger Hiss' perjury conviction, the Wisconsin senator thrived throughout the Korean War and never seemed more formidable than after the 1952 Republican landslide. The real key to the election was General Dwight Eisenhower's popularity, but, as always with McCarthy, perception trumped reality. A master of political symbolism, he had cast himself as the two-fisted hero in a cosmic drama, and much of the American public was enthralled.</p>
<p>As the Republicans now controlled the Senate, McCarthy became chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which he ran as a one-man show. (Only a few weeks after he assumed his chairmanship, Arthur Miller's <i>The Crucible</i> opened on Broadway, providing a readymade metaphor for what was happening in Washington.) Targeting the State Department, McCarthy called investigations at will, wreaking havoc but uncovering little. During the summer of 1953, he announced plans to subpoena former President Harry Truman, held a one-day hearing on a conspiracy to assassinate … himself, and variously threatened to probe the Atomic Energy Commission, the CIA, and the Pentagon. As the year waned, he finally discovered that a left-wing Army dentist named Irving Peress had been promoted to major -- the armed forces were rife with communist subversion! </p>
<p>A January 1954 Gallup Poll gave McCarthy a 50-percent favorable rating. Then, on Tuesday evening, March 9, 1954, CBS broadcast <i>See It Now</i>'s “A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.” And everything changed. Did TV really bring down McCarthy? As noted by historian Thomas Doherty in <i>Cold War, Cool Medium</i>, “Murrow was neither the first nor did he risk the most in challenging McCarthyism.” More than a few newspapermen, editorial cartoonists, and radio commentators had already attacked the senator; <i>The New York Times</i>, the <i>New York Herald-Tribune</i>, <i>The Washington Post</i>, and even <i>Time</i> magazine were hostile to McCarthy. Indeed, the very day of Murrow's report, Senator Ralph Flanders, Republican of Vermont, had ridiculed McCarthy's investigation: “He dons his war paint. He goes into his war dance. He emits his war whoops. He goes forth to battle and proudly returns with the scalp of a pink Army dentist.”</p>
<p>Flanders' remarks brought immediate congratulation from President Eisenhower -- but Eisenhower did not present himself as McCarthy's antagonist. That role was assumed by Murrow, a familiar face and voice -- even something of a war hero, remembered for his live broadcasts during the London Blitz -- who would bring McCarthy into America's living rooms.</p>
<p></p><center>* * *</center>
<p><i>Good Night, and Good Luck</i> picks up the McCarthy saga some months before the famous broadcast, in October 1953, with the CBS news staff discussing the network loyalty oath that even Murrow signed. (In one of its few historical lapses, the movie implies that this oath -- implemented nearly three years earlier -- is a recent development.) Murrow (David Strathairn) and his producer, Fred Friendly (Clooney), are planning their anti-McCarthy strategy. The first <i>See It Now</i> treatment of McCarthy (or his –ism) will report an egregious case of guilt by association: Air Force Reserve officer Milo Radulovich has been labeled a “security risk” and asked to resign his commission because he continues to maintain contact with his immigrant father, a reader of allegedly “subversive newspapers.”</p>
<p>Nervous CBS declined to promote the telecast, so Murrow and Friendly paid for a <i>New York Times</i> ad themselves. But, as with Lucy, human interest and family values -- amplified by television -- trumped the communist threat. Although the Pentagon initially challenged the story as “without merit,” it was only a matter of time before the secretary of the Air Force appeared on <i>See It Now</i> to announce that the young lieutenant had been exonerated. </p>
<p>According to Doherty, Murrow and Friendly had their McCarthy report prepared and were only waiting for an opportune airdate. And in early 1954, McCarthy provided that when he told General Ralph W. Zicker, whom he had been badgering regarding the Peress promotion, that he was “not fit to wear [his] uniform.” In <i>Good Night, and Good Luck</i>, the impetus comes from the staff's desire to protect Murrow: “We've got to hit McCarthy before they go after Ed.” </p>
<p><i>Good Night, and Good Luck</i> recreates much of the March 9 show, which was itself an exercise in intellectual montage, largely devoted to showcasing McCarthy's interrogation of bewildered witnesses. But the movie is hardly a straightforward reconstruction. Rather than digitally Gump-ing Strathairn into the televised '50s, Clooney rigorously juxtaposes (and, in effect, annotates) the actual McCarthy with Strathairn's cannily understated performance. Bertolt Brecht would have approved: Strathairn doesn't impersonate Murrow, he quotes him -- delivering Murrow's famous closer, arguably the most eloquent expression of Cold War liberalism prior to John F. Kennedy's inaugural speech, directly into the camera.</p>
<p>Murrow's report on McCarthy was well received, and, documenting testimony given in the following days, <i>See It Now</i> pushed its advantage. “Annie Lee Moss Before the McCarthy Committee,” telecast the following week, presented the dramatic high point of McCarthy's current investigation into a middle-aged African American code clerk fired by the Pentagon for her alleged Communist Party affiliations. Moss proved the most sympathetic -- or perhaps just the most pathetic -- of victims. “No one who heard [this poor, utterly nonpolitical woman] could doubt her honesty,” I.F. Stone wrote at the time. “‘Wazzat?' she cried when [Senator Stuart Symington] asked her if she had ever read Karl Marx.” (Moss' performance is all the more fascinating in that she most likely was a party member brilliantly feigning befuddlement to bamboozle the subcommittee.)</p>
<p>Featuring a telegenic character comparable to Milo Radulovich's father, who had memorably called upon President Eisenhower in broken English to reinstate his boy, “Annie Lee Moss” received even better press notices than the McCarthy report. On April 6, <i>See It Now</i> telecast McCarthy's response. Glaring into the camera, the senator sonorously denounced Murrow as “the leader and the cleverest of the jackal pack which is always found at the throat of anyone who dares to expose Communists or traitors.” In the movie, as in life, no comment needs to be made. McCarthy is practically booing himself. </p>
<p>When someone bursts into the newsroom, shouting, “The Senate is investigating McCarthy!” Strathairn's Murrow permits himself a single smile. But then the bad news: His colleague Don Hollenbeck (Ray Wise), host of <i>CBS Views the Press</i>, ill and harassed by a red-baiting Hearst TV critic, has committed suicide. (Hollenbeck's death actually occurred a few months later.) The following week, the Army-McCarthy hearings began, and McCarthy was history. To see it, rent the 1964 documentary by Emile de Antonio, <i>Point of Order</i>.</p>
<p></p><center>* * *</center>
<p>As filmmaking, <i>Good Night, and Good Luck</i> is strikingly ascetic. Clooney's Murrow seemingly has no life other than his television productions. He is perfectly focused -- and so is the movie. <i>Good Night, and Good Luck</i> may be a bit didactic and a tad schematic (after every crucial scene, the CBS newsroom retires en masse to a neighborhood boîte to drink in chanteuse Dianne Reeves). But it is also surprisingly serious.</p>
<p>Or maybe not so surprising: An outspoken liberal who used an interview with Charlie Rose to compare the Bush family to the Sopranos, Clooney has shown himself to be a filmmaker whose main interest is political drama. He co-produced the short-lived Washington quasi-reality series <i>K Street</i> and the live telecast of <i>Fail-Safe</i>; his first movie, <i>Confessions of a Dangerous Mind</i>, dramatized Gong Show host Chuck Barris' fantastic assertions that he had really been an undercover CIA hit man -- giddier, but not altogether unrelated to <i>Good Night, and Good Luck</i> in its portrayal of tele-heroics.</p>
<p><i>Good Night, and Good Luck</i> celebrates the fraternity of the newsroom and burns much tobacco on the altar of Murrow's cult. It is not, however, a self-congratulatory celebration of television. The movie is framed by a 1958 testimonial dinner in which Murrow delivers a stern jeremiad on the medium; it reaches its climax when the triumphant newsman is called on the carpet by CBS Chairman William Paley (Frank Langella at his chilliest). Murrow's reward for demolishing McCarthy is, in essence, a demotion. Paley informs his star reporter that he will be doing fewer episodes of <i>See It Now</i>, which is also to be buried in an obscure time slot, and more of the prime-time celebrity journalism practiced in his other show, <i>Person to Person</i>.</p>
<p>The lesson has scarcely dated. Murrow bested McCarthy in good measure because personality trumps information in the ongoing miniseries of American public life. Thanks to television, it still does. </p>
<p><i>J. Hoberman is a senior film critic for The Village Voice and the author, most recently, of The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties.</i></p>
</div></div></div>Sun, 18 Sep 2005 22:07:33 +0000144855 at http://prospect.orgJ. HobermanLightning, Camera, Actionhttp://prospect.org/article/lightning-camera-action
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>By J. Hoberman</p>
<p>Can photographs, motion pictures, and television create social change? Or would it be more accurate to say that these camera-based forms construct a social reality? Michael Moore notwithstanding, the ultimate test case appeared 90 years ago: D.W. Grifﬁth's <i>The </i><i>Birth </i><i>of </i><i>a </i><i>Nation</i>, released throughout America in the spring of 1915, remains the single most important movie ever made in this country, as well as the most inﬂammatory one. </p>
<p>A culmination of the hundreds of short, two-reel narratives, more or less codifying the language of narrative cinema, that Grifﬁth ground out at the Biograph studio between 1908 and 1913, <i>The </i><i>Birth </i><i>of </i><i>a </i><i>Nation </i>was the longest, costliest, and most ambitious American movie of its day. Imagine an unholy cross between <i>The </i><i>Passion </i><i>of </i><i>the </i><i>Christ </i>and <i>Fahrenheit </i><i>9</i><i>/</i><i>11</i>, combined and rendered mega-<i>Titanic </i>(most movies in 1915 were still only 20 minutes long), drenched in the patriotic pathos of <i>Saving </i><i>Private </i><i>Ryan</i>, and tricked out with the historical shenanigans of <i>Forrest </i><i>Gump</i>. It still wouldn't approximate the magnitude of Grifﬁth's fervent, tendentious, wildly entertaining achievement. </p>
<p>Viewers were inundated with a cascade of images -- 1,500 separate shots when other features had fewer than 100. Like the Henry Ford of cine narrative, Grifﬁth created an assembly line for cinema meaning; he broke dramatic scenes into component parts and reassembled them for maximum emotional impact. <i>The </i><i>Birth </i><i>of </i><i>a </i><i>Nation </i>hurtled through time and space, making unprecedented use of close-ups, cutaways, and parallel action. The miracle of moving pictures, less than 20 years old, was projected into the past. Grifﬁth gave motion to Matthew Brady's photographs and staged Lincoln's assassination as a “historical facsimile,” complete with footnotes. Masses of extras were deployed to recreate the Battle of Petersburg and Sherman's march to the sea. Audiences were swept away; in some cities, the action was pumped with a 40-piece symphony orchestra. </p>
<p>In short, Grifﬁth had produced the wonder of the age: a technological marvel, a masterpiece of promotion, a brilliantly constructed emotional roller coaster, a box-ofﬁce gold mine -- and an utterly unambiguous and ruthlessly demagogic attack on African Americans. <i>The </i><i>Birth </i><i>of </i><i>a </i><i>Nation </i>is not simply the precursor of every Hollywood historical epic, stalker ﬁlm, and thriller ever made; adapted from a best-selling novel by the Reverend Thomas Dixon that offered a militantly white-supremacist perspective on the Civil War and Reconstruction, Grifﬁth's movie is an ideological horror show, ﬁlled with outrageous factual distortions and vile racial stereotypes. In the Gospel according to Grifﬁth, the American nation is born when, as one of the ﬁlm's climactic intertitles has it, the Ku Klux Klan enables North and South to unite in defense of their common “Aryan birthright.”</p>
<p><i>The </i><i>Birth </i><i>of </i><i>a </i><i>Nation </i>was released for the 50th anniversary of the end of the Civil War -- just as America's ultimate trauma was poised to pass from living memory into national mythology. The son of a Kentucky colonel, Grifﬁth took it upon himself to rewrite, and re-right, a historical wrong -- an act for which he sought, and received, ofﬁcial sanction. Two days before submitting the movie to the National Board of Review, he previewed it for President Woodrow Wilson and his cabinet. Wilson responded with the ultimate pull quote: “It is like writing history with lightning.” The following night the president had it screened for the justices of the Supreme Court and members of Congress.</p>
<p>The ﬁlm was immediately attacked by many organizations -- notably the NAACP, which issued a statement declaring that “every resource of a magniﬁcent new art has been employed with an undeniable attempt to picture Negroes in the worst possible light.” But it helped revive the KKK. Some 25,000 Klansmen marched down Peachtree Street in full regalia to celebrate the Atlanta premiere. Contested virtually everywhere it opened outside the old Confederacy, The Birth of a Nation was banned outright in Chicago, Cleveland, St. Louis, San Antonio, and Topeka, Kansas. Boston saw the most protracted struggle: Weeks of mass meetings, demonstrations, and even legislative action reached their climax in June 1915 and came to naught when Mayor James Michael Curley simply refused to close the movie.</p>
<p><i>The </i><i>Birth </i><i>of </i><i>Nation </i>grossed more than $60 million -- well over a billion contemporary dollars -- during its ﬁrst run. In New York, where it ran for 48 weeks, tickets were $2, at least 20 times as much as an ordinary picture show. Anticipating the special screenings to which secondary-school teachers escorted their classes, William Randolph Hearst's <i>New </i><i>York </i><i>Evening </i><i>Journal </i>advised that, above all: “Children must be sent to see this masterpiece. Any parent who neglects this advice is committing an educational offense, for no ﬁlm has ever produced more educational points than Grifﬁth's latest achievement.” Throughout the rural South and Midwest, exhibitors chartered trains to bring audiences to large cities to see what Grifﬁth had wrought. </p>
<p></p><center>* * *</center>
<p>Marshaling the resources of its medium, <i>The </i><i>Birth </i><i>of </i><i>a </i><i>Nation </i>made history. More crucially, it changed history -- that is, it changed the ways by which the past might be represented. In Grifﬁth's hands, the American past became a melodrama, at once cosmic and intimate. The Civil War is all in the family. The cataclysmic battle is punctuated by sudden close-ups of familiar characters; a distraught ﬁctional mother meets the real Abraham Lincoln, who spares her Confederate son; in one of several metaphoric rape scenes, the Union army invades a speciﬁc southern home as the fearful family retreats from room to room.</p>
<p>No one has ever been more expressive than Grifﬁth in subsuming 10,000 casualties in a single battleﬁeld reunion or folding historical calamity in the pathos of an individual soldier's homecoming. But that, of course, is what war has become -- and not just on the screen. As the most heavily televised military operation in history, the Iraq War was necessarily an exercise in image making. Although immediately exposed as a staged pseudo-event, the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue lives on as television, broadcast when necessary to represent Iraq's liberation; the battle for Fallujah was the iconic <i>Los </i><i>Angeles </i><i>Times </i>photograph of a 20-year-old Marine dubbed the “Marlboro Man” for his battle-stained face and dangling cigarette. </p>
<p>The Iraq War's great human-interest item, the story of Private Jessica Lynch, is precisely the sort of captivity-and-rescue saga Grifﬁth remade a dozen times as a Biograph two-reeler. Human interest is, for Grifﬁth, history's driving force. He locates the impetus for Reconstruction in a sexual liaison between Senator Austin Stoneman, his stand-in for Senator Thaddeus Stevens, and Stoneman's mulatto housekeeper -- “the great leader's weakness that is to blight a nation.” History is its own allegory. (This sort of ﬁlmmaking is hardly restricted to Americans. The fervor with which German audiences embraced the recent <i>Downfall</i>, a re-enactment of Hitler's last days in the bunker, is less a testament to Bruno Ganz's performance as a “humanized” führer than the ﬁlmmakers' skill in surrounding the devil and his familiars with real yet airbrushed “ordinary” Germans to establish Germany as the ﬁrst Nazi victim.)</p>
<p>Grifﬁth taught the movies to take history personally, and politicians have been following his lead ever since. No one until Steven Spielberg has been better at pressing America's buttons -- unless it was Ronald Reagan, whose uncanny ability to recast American life into a movie starring a wisecracking action hero like himself reached its apotheosis a year ago in the media narratives occasioned by his death. Reagan was resurrected in a particularly awful way when Arnold Schwarzenegger created his own movie within the hyper-designed triumphalist pseudo-event of the 2004 Republican national convention. (What's remarkable is how long it took right-wing Republicans to admit how much they love Hollywood's animated action ﬁgures. Would that the misdirected satire <i>Team </i><i>America </i>had taken that for its subject.) </p>
<p>But the melodrama of American politics is not only manifested in choreographed pep rallies, prepackaged “good news” segments, or even the robotic blitz of applied movie-dialogue sound bites that Schwarzenegger offered as a panacea for California's problems. As demonstrated by <i>The </i><i>Birth </i><i>of </i><i>a </i><i>Nation</i>, the scenario rules (and so does demonization). The 2004 election was more or less decided last July with the Republicans' redeﬁnition of John Kerry's heroism and preemptive destruction of his Viet-vet narrative. George W. Bush's premature declaration of victory in Iraq may have been a joke, but it established him as a leader at home in a pilot's costume. For all of Kerry's Hollywood support, he was outacted.</p>
<p>The made-for-TV <i>DC </i><i>9</i><i>/</i><i>11</i><i>: </i><i>Time </i><i>of </i><i>Crisis</i>, the most signiﬁcant political movie of the 2004 campaign, went Grifﬁth one better by staging a recent event with a professional cast impersonating the current president and his administration. (There's no precedent: The Kennedys contrived a Hollywood <i>PT</i><i>-</i><i>109 </i>as a run-up to 1964; imagine if it had been a dramatization of the Cuban missile crisis!) Why not construct a narrative improvement on events as they unfold? “We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” a Bush spokesman famously told reporter Ron Suskind on the eve of the election. </p>
<p></p><center>* * *</center>
<p>As was made apparent last summer when the Silent Movie Theatre in Los Angeles was forced to cancel a well-publicized screening, <i>The </i><i>Birth </i><i>of </i><i>a </i><i>Nation </i>is all but unshowable today. It is also humiliating to watch. Every year when I teach cinema history, I must convince myself that students need to see and discuss it if they are to understand the country in which they live. </p>
<p>We are all citizens of the state that Grifﬁth prophesied -- the empire of total docudrama where actual ﬁgures mingle with ﬁctional ones, real events are imbued with storybook logic, and everything is reﬂected in relentless hype. <i>The </i><i>Birth </i><i>of </i><i>a </i><i>Nation </i>is an object lesson in the manufacture of an image-based spectacle. Creaky as it is, the mechanism still works. The appeal is not to reason. </p>
<p>What's most chastening about <i>The </i><i>Birth </i><i>of </i><i>a </i><i>Nation </i>is its demonstration of what it can do, and, by extension, what all forms of camera-constructed reality can do. Grifﬁth reminds us that movies are an authoritarian medium, that a successful ﬁlm narrative is largely a function of gross emotional manipulation, and that history may not only be written but rewritten with lightning. </p>
<p><i>J. Hoberman is a senior ﬁlm critic for The Village Voice and the author of The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties.</i></p>
</div></div></div>Sun, 22 May 2005 19:05:51 +0000144546 at http://prospect.orgJ. HobermanFilm: Ernesto Goes to the Movieshttp://prospect.org/article/film-ernesto-goes-movies
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>He was, per Jean-Paul Sartre, “the most complete human being of our age.” Not to be outdone, Susan Sontag eulogized him as “the clearest, most unequivocal image of the humanity of the world-wide revolutionary struggle unfolding today.” He, of course, is Ernesto “Che” Guevara, although the key word in Sontag's formulation is neither “humanity” nor “revolutionary” but “image.” </p>
<p>You could find that image at the heart of the Montreal Museum of Fine Art's recent show <i>Global Village: The 1960s</i>, on the wall of a room provocatively called “Disorder.” The image graced the posters used to advertise the show, and it was reproduced ad infinitum in the museum gift shop, amply (and ironically?) stocked with all manner of Che Guevara tchotchkes. Is it Che who gives the lost world and failed aspirations of the 1960s a human face?</p>
<p>Che Guevara's posthumous role as an icon and fashion statement has now lasted twice as long as his political career. Born to a left-wing, upper-middle-class family in Rosario, Argentina, in 1928 (the same year as international icon Mickey Mouse and ultimate iconographer Andy Warhol), he was an international political celebrity before he turned 32, slyly smiling on the cover of <i>Time</i> magazine in August 1960, flanked by subsidiary images of powerhouses Nikita Khrushchev and Mao Tse-tung. That same summer, Cuban photographer Alberto Korda snapped a more flattering portrait of El Che, long hair topped by a perfectly placed black beret and flowing in the winds of change, gaze resolutely focused on anti-imperialist struggle. </p>
<p>Officially known as <i>Heroic Guerrilla</i>, Korda's picture might be the most famous and most appropriated photographic portrait ever (the inevitable late Warhol multiple was utterly redundant). It's also an image no mere mortal could live up to. Indeed, Che the revolutionary martyr was born October 7, 1967, when another photograph, this one amazingly Christ-like, flashed out of a Bolivian pueblo and around the world -- “the corpse of the last armed prophet laid out on a sink in a shed, displayed by flashlight,” wrote Robert Lowell. </p>
<p>Armed prophet of Third World upheaval, unlikely combination of Tom Joad and Mick Jagger, El Che imbued the revolution with a sense of archaic chivalry. It was while touring Europe in the aftermath of Che's death that movie mogul Darryl F. Zanuck became aware of the dead guerrilla's “tremendous appeal” for young people and instructed his son Richard to quickly develop a Guevara biopic with Omar Sharif in the title role. Released in 1969, the film was a cautiously pandering bore, anathema to both radical New Leftists and right-wing Cubans.</p>
<p>Che Guevara was not only a dorm-room pin-up to rival Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison but the poster boy for repressive tolerance and co-optive commodification. Hans Magnus Enzensberger's 1970 essay “Constituents for a Theory of the Media” cites the Olivetti Corporation's appropriation of Che's image for an ad celebrating its creative sales force: “We would have hired him” was the boldly tautological assertion. Before the '70s ended, Che was relegated to the attic of cultural memory -- at least outside of Cuba. But with the end of the Cold War, the closest thing to a superstar that international communism ever produced re-emerged as a capitalist tool, emblazoned on a top-selling Swatch watch and otherwise used to sell shoes, beer, cigars, and skis. In a totally unexpected way, Che became the embodiment of free-market globalism.</p>
<p>In Cuba, where the day of his death is a national holiday, Che remains a revolutionary trademark and constant presence -- the New Socialist Man, model for several generations of schoolchildren. But his cult of personality has long since ceased to be a function of state power. The old Che may linger still in Vietnam and Mozambique, among the Senderos and the Zapatistas; but in the Bolivian village where he was shot, he is Santo Che de La Huigera -- believed to work miracles, his portrait juxtaposed with that of Christ in the local mercado. In Buenos Aires, Che enjoys a more secular beatification; his image signifies pure celebrity, appearing on souvenir stands in concert with those of two other hometown heroes, tango singer Carlos Gardel and Eva Peron. (And Evita herself -- which is to say Madonna -- dressed as Che for the cover of her <i>American Life</i> CD.) </p>
<p>Barack Obama has been called a political “rock star,” but El Che is a <i>dead</i> political rock star -- consigned forever to the hell (or purgatory) of images, his corpse to be endlessly consumed in the bistro that <i>The Simpsons</i> once termed “Chez Guevara” (or the London bar Che, or the Cairo theme boîte Che Guevara, where the waiters dress in uniformed black berets and the menus are for sale). Mike Tyson tattooed Che's image on his chest, former Senator Gary Hart published a pseudonymous novel titled <i>I, Che Guevara</i>; a Williamsburg (Brooklyn, not Virginia) children's boutique hawks baby-sized Che T-shirts. A “third way” fascist microparty has Che on its Web site. The guerrilla's trademark beret has been placed atop Taco Bell's talking Chihuahua. A Russian poster artist morphed <i>Heroic Guerrilla</i> into a character from <i>Planet of the Apes</i>, and the <i>National Review</i> used the same image to smear a doleful-looking John Kerry. Serious Che art -- Jay Cantor's historical novel <i>The Death of Che Guevara</i>, Richard Dindo's documentary <i>Ernesto Che Guevara: The Bolivian Diaries</i> (and its avant-garde appropriation, James Benning's <i>Utopia</i>), Leonardo Katz's experimental film <i>El Día Que Me Quieras</i> -- has tended to concern Che's martyrdom. </p>
<p>But that was before <i>The Motorcycle Diaries</i>. Withheld from publication until 1995 (and still omitted from Cuba's “authorized” Guevara canon), Che's rewritten journal of a youthful road trip taken in the company of fellow medical student Alberto Granado sold a fast 30,000 copies in a Verso paperback blurbed as “<i>Das Kapital</i> meets <i>Easy Rider</i>.” A new generation of devotees was thrilled to discover the young Che as a romantic, poetry-reading hipster who, in the course of his bildungsroman across Argentina, over the Andes, and up Chile into Peru, discovers his Latin American identity. </p>
<p>The <i>Motorcycle Diaries</i> movie, which premiered at Sundance, competed in Cannes, and opens in the United States this month, was masterminded by its executive producer, Robert Redford, who recruited Brazilian director (and Sundance Institute alum) Walter Salles to make the film in Spanish, with a Latin American cast. Che, or “Fuser” as his comrade calls him, is played by Gael García Bernal, the star of Mexican cinema's greatest export, <i>Y Tu Mama Tambien</i>, and its biggest domestic hit, <i>The Crime of Father Amaro</i>. (Bernal, now 25, had already played Che in the 2002 Showtime miniseries <i>Fidel</i>.) </p>
<p>If not precisely a pussycat, Salles' Che is certainly a sweetheart. He's young and hot (although not as gorgeous as the beardless real Che on the cover of the movie's paperback tie-in). He's shyly avid and a little horny (although not as horny as his buddy Granado, played by Argentine actor Rodrigo de la Serna). James Dean without self-pity, Jack Kerouac sans narcissism, young Che Guevara is a bit of a daredevil, yet he's sensitive enough to have his heart broken; if not yet a communist, he's sufficiently empathetic to give the last of his asthma medicine to a poor, dying old woman. </p>
<p>The movie was shot in sequence and, drawing as much on Granado's <i>Traveling with Che Guevara: The Making of a Revolutionary</i> (published in Cuba 17 years before <i>The Motorcycle Diaries</i>) as on Che's account, shows its heroes taking their spills and losing their tent, their adventures in Chile's tough towns punctuated by Che's asthma attacks and the motorcycle's many breakdowns. Ultimately the guys junk the bike and continue hitchhiking across the desert -- where, in the first of several political epiphanies, they meet a proletarian couple out of <i>The Grapes of Wrath</i>. Climbing Machu Picchu inspires a vision of Latin American unity, while Che's climactic stay in a Peruvian leper colony enables him to bond with the wretched of the earth. </p>
<p><i>The Motorcycle Diaries</i> is an often glorious travelogue to which the filmmakers add a few romantic and picaresque touches -- and one political one. As Guevara and Granado refuse to attend Mass, the nuns attempt to deny them food, sparking a demonstration of patient solidarity with the young medics. Dropped, however, is the book's closing evocation of Che's willingness to become “a sacred space within which the bestial howl of the triumphant proletariat can resound with new energy and new hope.”</p>
<p>Reviewing the book several years back, Christopher Hitchens drolly declared Che Guevara to be a pioneer exponent of magic realism: “The boy ‘Che' drunkenly spouting pan-Americanism to an audience of isolated lepers in a remote jungle [is] a scene that Werner Herzog might hesitate to script, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez to devise.” The movie, in which even the nuns are won over to Che's vision, is more an example of soft socialist realism. Che cannot tell a lie -- he's honest to a fault. Glib but effective, Salles' <i>Diaries</i> grows increasingly heroic in tone, culminating in a scene where the asthmatic hero swims across a river and back to total Rocky-like acclaim. It's a tasteful hagiography designed to underscore Che's most celebrated one-liner (at least in the States) that “the true revolutionary is guided by feelings of great love.”</p>
<p>Although <i>The Motorcycle Diaries</i> doesn't make much of it, Guevara was still a disciple of Gandhi in 1952. Perhaps a subsequent movie -- one is in production, starring Benicio Del Toro, and still another is rumored, with Antonio Banderas, who played Che in <i>Evita</i> -- will detail the year El Che spent in Guatemala, where, thanks to his ringside seat for the 1954 CIA coup that ousted elected President Jacobo Arbenz, he underwent his revolutionary conversion (which included a lifelong anti-Americanism). </p>
<p>After all, the religion of Che is still relatively recent -- it's been only 37 years since the prophet was martyred. </p>
<p><i>J. Hoberman is The Village Voice's film critic.</i></p>
</div></div></div>Sun, 19 Sep 2004 20:55:18 +0000143879 at http://prospect.orgJ. HobermanRevolution Now (and Then)!http://prospect.org/article/revolution-now-and-then
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><i>The Battle of Algiers</i> is back -- along with The Battle of Algiers scenario. At a time when Gillo Pontecorvo's documentary-style account of a bloody, anti-colonialist urban uprising has been used by commentators from Tariq Ali to Zbigniew Brzezinski to describe the situation in occupied Iraq, and only months after a well-publicized screening at the Pentagon, the movie itself is poised for re-release in January.</p>
<p>
"Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it 'the way it was,'" Walter Benjamin wrote in his final essay. "It means appropriating a memory as it flashes by in a moment of danger." Arguably the key political movie of its period, replete with a reception comparable in tumult to that accorded <i>Battleship Potemkin</i>, <i>The Battle of Algiers</i> was produced in the mid-1960s, set a decade earlier and made in the style of a 1940s newsreel. Which memory has been appropriated in 2004? </p>
<p>
Authenticity has always been crucial to the movie's authority. If <i>The Battle of Algiers</i> is a masterpiece of Third Worldist cinema -- and, per Pauline Kael, "the one great revolutionary 'sell' of modern times" -- it is because it looks like a news bulletin and moves like a thriller. Commissioned by the Algerian government, influenced by <i>The Wretched of the Earth</i> and operating, as Pontecorvo would say, under the "dictatorship of truth," the director and his screenwriter, Franco Solinas, projected the post-World War II neorealism of <i>Open City</i> and <i>La Terra Trema</i> into a new arena: the barrio of colonized underdevelopment. </p>
<p>
Even today, <i>The Battle of Algiers</i> has astonishing immediacy, anticipating the artfully raw you-are-there vérité of more recent movies like <i>Bloody Sunday</i> and <i>Black Hawk Down</i>. "There are actors, but there is no 'acting,'" <i>Life</i> magazine would marvel; the original American distributor felt compelled to include a boasting disclaimer, "This dramatic re-enactment of The Battle of Algiers contains NOT ONE FOOT of Newsreel or Documentary film."</p>
<p>
Pontecorvo, shooting largely with a handheld camera under available light, enjoyed extensive use of Algiers as a movie set, and he cast the Algerian people as a collective protagonist. Like <i>La Terra Trema</i>, <i>The Battle of Algiers</i> was cast almost entirely with nonprofessionals, including the film's Algerian producer, Yacef Saadi, essentially playing himself as one of the revolutionary leaders. The part of the guerrilla-protagonist Ali la Pointe was given to an illiterate farmer who, Pontecorvo recalled, had to be "coached step by step through his lines." European tourists and local prostitutes were recruited for other roles. The film's lone professional actor played the French commander Col. Mathieu, modeled on Gen. Jacques Massu. (Ironically, the lean and martial Jean Martin was a signatory to a manifesto against the war in Algeria and suffered professionally as a result.)</p>
<p>
Even more remarkable was Pontecorvo's eschewal of blatant agitprop. Although filled with dramatic close-ups and gut-wrenching action, <i>The Battle of Algiers</i> has an almost Olympian detachment: Watching it one might be watching the impersonal flow of history. The son of a prosperous Italian Jewish manufacturer, Pontecorvo had been a Communist partisan during World War II and a Communist Party functionary thereafter. By the time he left the party, following the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, he had embarked on a career as a photojournalist and filmmaker that would be crowned when <i>The Battle of Algiers</i> won the Golden Lion at the 1966 Venice Film Festival. The French delegation walked out on both the screening and the awards ceremony. (Initially banned, the film would not be released in France until 1971.) </p>
<p>
In September 1967, <i>The Battle of Algiers</i> opened the New York Film Festival, only weeks after riots had decimated Newark, N.J., and Detroit and less than a month before -- with the U.S. Army in the streets of Washington for the first time since the Bonus March of 1932 -- 50,000 protesters massed on the National Mall and headed for the Pentagon. It was the same season that brought the martyrdom of Che Guevara and the canonization of Bonnie and Clyde.</p>
<p>
<i>The Battle of Algiers</i> was sensationally received, with many reviewers making the connection between Algeria and Vietnam or Algiers and America's inner cities (or both). The movie would be nominated for three Oscars, but <i>Newsweek</i> detected a menacing trend. "At the recent New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center and later at a first-run theater on Manhattan's East Side," the magazine observed, "many young Negroes cheered or laughed knowingly at each terrorist attack on the French, as if <i>The Battle of Algiers</i> were a textbook and a prophecy of urban guerrilla warfare to come." Pontecorvo's movie offered invaluable instruction in the language of communiqués, organization of cells, placement of terrorist bombs and use-value of cop-killing -- not to mention inspiration for the ululations employed by the Weathermen during their October 1969 "Days of Rage."</p>
<p>
Three years after its release, <i>The New York Times</i> covered the screening of <i>The Battle of Algiers</i> at the Thalia, a small revival theater on Manhattan's Upper West Side, noting the "laughter and applause when bombs planted by Algerian women destroyed restaurants frequented by the French." The <i>Times</i> reported that both the FBI and the Army had screened prints for their intelligence operatives. A few months later, in the course of the trial of 13 Black Panthers charged with a conspiracy to bomb public places and murder police officers in New York, an undercover detective testified that defendant Lumumba Shakur (stepfather of the murdered rapper Tupac Shakur) told him that <i>The Battle of Algiers</i> was required viewing. </p>
<p>
Over the course of the lengthy trial, the prosecution introduced the movie as evidence and screened it for the jury (which eventually acquitted all 13 defendants). Juror Edwin Kennebeck later wrote in his book <i>Juror Number Four</i> that <i>The Battle of Algiers</i> "did more to help me see things from the defense point of view than the DA suspected." Could the Pentagon screenings have been organized by a middle-aged <i>soixante-huitard</i>, or a Defense Department lefty mole? What things did the 40 officers and civilian experts invited to that screening by the Directorate for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict see?</p>
<p>
The first half of <i>The Battle of Algiers</i> is the Panther primer. The movie begins in medias res, with the French army having tortured a pitiful Algerian informer to reveal the lair of the last extant urban guerrilla leader, Ali. It then jumps back three years to show Ali's political awakening and recruitment into the National Liberation Front (FLN), usually referred to in the film as "the Organization." As Ali's previously inchoate rage is instrumentalized in revolutionary struggle, so the Organization cleans up vice in the casbah and launches a campaign of assassination carried out largely by women and children against the French police. </p>
<p>
The casbah -- occasionally referred to in the subtitles as "the ghetto" -- is sealed from the rest of the city, and elements in the colonial administration set off a devastating explosion within it. Pressed by the enraged Arabs, the Organization takes revenge. In the movie's crucial sequence, three fetching revolutionary women adopt Western clothes. They make their way through the checkpoint, one with a child in tow, to set off simultaneous bombs in the commercial heart of European Algiers. Pontecorvo individualizes both terrorists and victims -- and makes sure that the terrorists acknowledge those whom they are about to vaporize. Where once this sequence might have suggested tragic necessity, it's impossible to watch it now without recalling the images of suicide bus bombings and the Twin Towers collapse. Our moment of danger is September 11, the day The Battle of Algiers came home. The FLN now seems the cradle of Middle Eastern terror. As the Pentagon flier put it: "Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range. Women plant bombs in cafés. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar?"</p>
<p>
The movie's last half illustrates the flier's hook: "How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas." French reaction is personified by the newly arrived Col. Mathieu -- looking not unlike a meaner, cooler Wesley Clark -- who accepts the mission of demolishing the Organization. "There are 80,000 Arabs in the casbah‚" he tells his men. "Are they all against us? We know they are not. In reality, it is only a small minority that dominates with terror and violence. This minority is our adversary and we must isolate and destroy it." How familiar that must sound! </p>
<p>
Mathieu has ideas. He is a theoretician, a Marxist in reverse, even. His campaign is successful but -- as he, more than anyone else in the movie, realizes -- history belongs to the FLN. At one point Mathieu turns on a press conference full of hostile French journalists and forces them to clarify their own privileged positions. "I would now like to ask you a question: Should France remain in Algeria? If you answer 'yes,' then you must accept all the necessary consequences." A montage of Algerians subject to torture follows. </p>
<p>
This, one imagines, is the key moment of the Pentagon's <i>Battle of Algiers</i>. The use of torture to break down prisoners caused an international outcry in 1957, and to this day it remains an issue in France. (As recently as 2000 and shortly before he died, Massu expressed regret.) To succeed, the American occupation must consign such abuses to the Baathist past -- indeed, the rationale for the invasion of Iraq long ago shifted from Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction to his dungeons of horror. But doesn't the invasion itself demonstrate that, in the war against terrorism, all means are available? </p>
<p>
From necessary violence to necessary consequences, what goes around comes around. For the Pentagon no less than the Panthers, <i>The Battle of Algiers</i> is distinguished by its verisimilitude. But if the revolutionaries of the '60s saw historical inevitability, the Pentagon seeks a happier ending: In its remake, Mathieu must be hailed as the casbah's liberator -- and not just by the American media. <i>The Battle of Algiers</i> scenario may have been a Black Panther fantasy. For the Bush administration, it is a nightmare, already too real.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 15 Dec 2003 22:09:02 +0000143186 at http://prospect.orgJ. Hoberman